A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev Read Free Book Online Page A

to the house, too,” she would instruct us. “And listen closely, because it will answer back.”
    Benjamin said, “But it’s a house. How can a house answer?” And I said, “Hello, house,” and I fell silent and listened like you asked me to. “Be quiet, Benjamin,” you said. “And both of you, listen closely” The house was happy, too, at our return, and it breathed and it answered just as you promised. We crossed the threshold and you said, “Let’s have a bite to eat,” which meant a few slices of bread topped with soft cheese “spread oh so thin” and a hard-boiled egg—
Plaff!
—and anchovy substitute in a yellow tube and chopped parsley and tomato sliced so thin it was nearly transparent. Because that was what one did at home. One returned home, and said hello, and heard the answer, and entered. And then one had a bite to eat and was overcome with joy: we are home. From the hill, from the sea, from far away That is what we love and what we know how to do.
6
    M Y MOTHER and Yordad taught us many things even before we went to school. He would sit with us in front of the big German atlas and show us continents and islands and faraway lands, would send us sailing over oceans, crossing rivers, scaling mountain ranges and descending on the other side. She taught us to read and write.
    “The little dots and dashes under Hebrew letters tell the letters which way to go. An
aleph
with a single dot underneath is read
ee,
a
mem
that has a dash with a tail is
mah,”
she told us, using the letters that spelled
mother.
I giggled with pleasure, because the little dots changed the shape of her lips and the expression on her face, and also with relief, for now the letter knew which way to go and what to do.
    I was five years old then, and Benjamin would join the reading lessons. Even though he was only three, he picked it up faster than I. Within weeks he was already reading aloud the names of the poets, his legs skipping from grave to grave and his eyes skipping from the graves to my mother’s bright eyes. I remember how he even astonished and enchanted the passengers on the No. 4 bus: a veryyoung boy with golden hair reading the shop signs on Ben Yehuda Street in a precocious voice, in spite of the speed at which they passed by the window of the bus.
    And I remember the dinner on the balcony when my mother announced, “Soon we shall have a baby girl. Your little sister.”
    “How do you know it will be a girl?” I asked with apprehension. “Maybe we’ll have another brother.”
    “It will be a girl because that is what Mother wants,” Yordad explained. “She has done her FOR and AGAINST and decided that after wishing for and receiving two sons, now we shall have a daughter.”
    Then she teased us: “The FOR is she and the AGAINST is you two.”
    Within several weeks’ time she began to retch every morning, and I would retch along with her. Yordad said that pediatrics had never seen or heard of such identification between sons and their mothers and that this new phenomenon should be named for me. When he said this his lips smiled, but his eyes did not. A dull anger skittered across them, as though he were a witness to an intimacy he had never known.
    Every day we would sit, he and I, shelling almonds on the balcony “A pregnant woman must take care to eat properly,” he informed us, “and since there is not enough meat or eggs or cheese in the market, these almonds are a good and nutritious substitute. This way Mother will have plenty of milk and the baby girl will be large and healthy and her teeth will be white.”
    He permitted me to eat every seventh almond. “Whoever does not work does not get any”
    “But I’m working,” I boasted, expecting a compliment, too.
    “I am referring to your brother,” Yordad said in a loud, stern voice, to ensure that Benjamin would hear.
    Benjamin was playing off to the side and did not react. I gathered up my seventh almonds and chewed them until they were